Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 86

Win at trying

I can’t italicize a title, darn it.

Two blog posts in one day, ridiculous!

But my friend Tim said something to me tonight and I need to save it forever and this is the place where I save things forever, so… he said,

“You win at trying.”

It makes me want to do fist pumps, jump in the air and clap, turn my head up to the sky and shout in my loudest voice, “Yes.”

I win at trying. Getting out of bed is so hard sometimes and I do it anyway. When I can’t write the words, I at least open the files and look at them. It feels like nothing. I beat myself up about it. But I keep doing it, day after day after day.

And all I need to remember is to keep doing it. It’s not about finishing a book. It’s not about making a business work. It’s not about accomplishing anything. Never giving up is a success unto itself.

It’s my new life goal: Win at trying.

Gluten-free

A friend of mine who shares many of my health issues recently started this completely insane autoimmune-paleo diet, one of those restricted eating things that eliminates basically everything except meat and green vegetables from her life. (

Um, no, thank you. I like food, I like eating, I like cooking. I also like occasional sugar, plenty of pasta, eggs and dairy, caffeine in the mornings, wine in the evenings, and don’t even get me started on soy sauce. The idea of cooking without it? Yeah, no, not going to happen.

But somewhat randomly, for three days in a row, I didn’t eat any gluten. It was a little bit intentional–I paused before having granola or toast for breakfast and chose not to, and when dinner rolled around the third day, I decided to make something that I knew was gluten-free. But it was also happenstance, days when salad and veggies and pure proteins came my way easier than sandwiches and pasta. On the fourth day, C and I were on our way to yoga, and I told her that I thought I might be entering a hypomanic phase again.

That afternoon, I made pasta for lunch, ate the same pasta for dinner because I was in a hurry, and ate the leftover pasta for breakfast the next morning. And then crashed. That day, I got nothing done. After thinking I was getting hypomanic–lots of energy, lots of drive to get stuff done, super-efficiency mode–I was abruptly back in total sluggish depressed mode, finding it hard to get out of bed, not really interested in doing anything, too exhausted to continue the spree of cleaning chores I’d started the previous day.

The next day I decided to give gluten-free a try. Not the whole autoimmune-paleo thing–that looks way too hard! But just gluten-free. To see. Five days in and my energy level was back up. I was updating all my blogs, tracking my sales numbers, reading boards, organizing my closet, making plans, going out to lunch, inviting people over for dinner. Every last bit of laundry was done and put away. Even minor stuff — I changed the light bulb in the garage that burnt out months ago that I kept ignoring despite the inconvenience. It took five minutes to set up the ladder and I couldn’t think why I hadn’t done it ages ago.

And then last night I inadvertently ate some pasta that I thought was gluten-free but wasn’t.

Today, I’m normal again. I don’t feel bad, I feel normal. Not manic, but also not energetic. One job and then I want to take a break for a while. Yoga and afterwards I’m totally ready for a nap. The grocery store is exhausting. That’s normal. My normal. The way my normal has been for as long as I can remember.

And it is both dazzling and sort of terrifying to realize that my normal is a gluten-created normal and that I can have a new normal if I’m willing to eliminate gluten from my life.

That auto-immune diet, though, still looks just too hard.

Malaysian Cup of Coffee

A while back, I decided to add Google Play to the sites where my books were available. I spent an incredibly tedious several hours trying to make it work, finally got A Gift of Ghosts live on the site, and then pretty much said, ‘the hell with it.’ Well, no–I said, “I’ll do the others tomorrow,” and when tomorrow rolled around, I thought, “ugh, I can’t go through that again,” and that lasted for a few tomorrows in a row and finally I stopped thinking about it.

But because of my BookBub promotion last week, I found out that some copies had been downloaded on Google Play. When I looked at the numbers, someone from Malaysia had downloaded Ghosts. Malaysia! I don’t know why that was so exciting, but it was. A couple days later, I checked the numbers again and Ghosts had been downloaded in Malaysia four times. Four times! I don’t have a great mental image of Malaysia–it sort of blends with Thailand in my imagination, I think–but I pictured some tourist/college student at a hostel saying, ‘hey, you should check out this book I downloaded’ to an acquaintance from another country. Or a student practicing their English?

Anyway, it motivated me to post the other books to Google Play, because if someone wants to read my ghost stories in Malaysia, I am willing to help them do so, enough to brave the incredibly awful interface that Google thinks passes for acceptable. But I wish I could set the currency properly. All of the international sites do literal conversion: $3.99 translated to the equivalent in British pounds or Euros or Brazilian reals (got my first sale in Brazil this month!) or Indian rupees (ditto India!). But I want the conversion to be emotional instead. I want the exchange rate to equate values, so that every reader, anywhere in the world, is buying me a cup of their local coffee when they pay for my book, and buying themselves a small pleasure of about the same rate. I wish I knew how to make that happen.

But it would be incredibly complicated and unfortunately, Amazon’s algorithmic bots would probably price match and I’d wind up selling all the books, everywhere, for the price of a cup of coffee in Brazil, which would not buy me many coffees in Florida. Alas.

Funnily enough, though, when I went searching for information about the prices of coffee, I found this: Malaysian Starbucks prices. Turns out that in Malaysia, specifically, my books actually are priced about the same as Starbucks.

In other news, I’m working on three things at once, which is always bad for me. But Fen is due back from the editor on Sunday, so soon, very soon, I’ll be focused on her again for a few weeks. I can’t wait! Well, I can, but it’s hard.

Memorial Day

R graduated from high school today. Go, R, go.

For various perfectly reasonable reasons, no one except me could make it to the ceremony. I’m pretty good at solitude, but it’s profoundly lonely to celebrate a milestone in isolation, to sit by yourself in the audience and applaud, and not have anyone to turn to and say, “oh, doesn’t he look good,” and “oh, look, he’s trying not to laugh” and just… not be able to share the normal stuff that people share.

And I was sad.

But then, for the first time since she died, I felt such a profound sense of my mom being with me. I could truly almost hear her saying, “Don’t be stupid, of course I wouldn’t miss this, I’m so proud of you both.”

And then, behind her, Malcolm, saying, “Stuff and nonsense. Don’t be silly.”

This Memorial Day, I am thinking of my mom, who I love and miss. Of Malcolm, who I love and miss. Of Michelle, who I love and miss. Of my grandparents and my great-grandmother. Of Marjorie. Of Leslie. Of Luis and Judith and Mindy. Of Denice and Margaret and Jan, who all died so much too young.

I know it’s the military that we’re supposed to be acknowledging, so kudos to my grandpa who went to Japan. And as many kudos to my grandmother who stayed at home, alone with an infant, fuming about how he’d enlisted when he didn’t have to.

But I remember them all and miss them all.

PS I’m writing a very depressing Tassamara story. It’s a wonderful outlet for tears, but I’m not sure what I should do with it when I’m done. Post it here? Mail it out? Bury it forever? Do you want to read about the reception after Dillon’s memorial service?

Random minutia

I got my hair cut today.

I have long, brown, straight hair. On the surface, it’s as boring as hair gets. Basic brown. Straight. Fine.

Thick.

Cowlicky.

I told the woman who was cutting it–Super Cuts, this is how seriously I take my hair–it won’t behave once it’s short, I just want it to be short for summer so I can swim without spending the entire day with wet hair.

Nope, she was a professional.

Also a sweetheart.

She wanted to give me a haircut  I would like. She was willing to spend as long as it took to talk about my hair to try to find the perfect hairstyle that would work with my kind of hair and she was sure she could merge some different styles–stacked, not layered, mumble, mumble, stuff I don’t understand, etc.–to give me a short cut I would feel good about. I was pretty sure that nope, short enough to swim without spending the day with wet hair was all that I was going to get and it wasn’t something to worry about.

Forty minutes later, she was muttering as my hair got shorter and finally she said, “yeah, your hair is crazy cowlicky.”

Ha. They all get there in the end.

My hair does long and heavy and straight really well. As soon as I try to do anything short with it, it does ‘crazy curly all over the place’ really well. This is not a complaint. I quite like my hair. But hairstylists wind up going pale somewhere along the way, once they realize that their straight bob has turned into a kindergartener’s chop job. I am pretty sure that there are piece of hair on my head tonight that are no longer than two inches (having had eight or nine or ten inches cut off) because my poor hair stylist so wanted to make it… at the very least! … even.

But it’s really nice for swimming.

In other news, I am days behind on my writing blog and this week has been really busy and R! R! R! comes home tomorrow. (All those exclamation points are just to show how I feel. I pick my boy up at the airport at 7:15 and then we’re going out to breakfast and oh my goodness, that brings me joy.)

Self-realizations

We think we know ourselves.

We’re smart, self-aware, articulate people. (I’m assuming. But you know, you’ve got an internet connection and you’re reading my blog, you probably are smart, self-aware, and articulate. And you probably think you know yourself, too.) And then something happens that skews your whole world view sideways.

My kid made me watch the first episode of Hannibal when he was visiting at the beginning of April.

Oh, wait, no, that’s not what happened. My kid raved about Hannibal and said, every time, “You can’t watch it.”

I said, “Come off it, I want to watch, you love it, let me share your interests.” This is what moms of teenage boys say. Or think, anyway, even if they don’t say the words aloud.

He… well, if he was from another era, he would have thrown his hands up as he said, “Fine, on your head be it,” but he let me watch the first episode of Hannibal with him.

Twenty minutes in, I was hyperventilating. When the episode was over, he said, “What do you think?”

And I said, “It was awesome. What were you THINKING letting me watch that? Oh my God, that’s going to haunt me forever. Are you evil? Are you insane? How could you think that was okay? He TOUCHED him.”

I’m never going to watch another episode of Hannibal. One was enough. Also, it’s a brilliant television show and if you don’t have touch issues, you should probably watch it.

(If you haven’t seen the show, there’s a scene early on in the first episode in which the FBI guy–not, note the villain–violates the hero, Will’s, space repeatedly in minor ways. It made my skin crawl. I am pretty sure after the third time that FBI guy touched Will I actually got up and walked out of the room briefly because it was so unbearable.)

Unrelated, on an earlier occasion, C (hi, C!) told me that I was sensitive and I scoffed. I’m not sensitive, I’m tough. She pointed out that I will not watch television shows on which characters that I care about might get hurt and that that’s pretty much every television show ever. I… well, acquiesced. Yep. I don’t watch a lot of television. If there’s a character I like, I don’t want to watch him or her suffer. If there’s no character I like, why would I bother? If there’s no suffering–well, then there’s no story, so what’s the point? Resolution: read books, where things happen at the pace that I can tolerate.

All of this random rambling brings us to tonight. Today is the day of my first ever Bookbub ad. A Gift of Ghosts was, last I checked, at number 8 on the free Kindle bestseller list, the highest it has ever been. (Go, Bookbub, go.) I want nothing more than to keep clicking refresh on my Amazon page all night long, hoping I can catch it moving higher. But since that would be slightly insane of me and seriously boring, I decided to watch television instead.

I’m exactly the wimp that C and R think I am. As I skim through the shows, one after another, an entire universe of television, I realize that in this mood, there’s only one show that could possibly work: Love Boat. I want to see Love Boat. HEAs, all around.

My universe has kaleidoscoped and I’ve realized that I really am insane. Was Love Boat as bad as I remember it being? And/or as sweet? Because, honestly, that’s what I want to watch. Maybe I should hunt down some Harlequin romances to be the icing on the cake.

PS: Found an old Harlequin romance online, one that I read back when I was fourteen or fifteen. It took me approximately forty-five minutes to read and I feel sorta like I just ate a whole bag of M&Ms. Sugar overload.

Eenie-meenie-minie-mo

A Lonely Magic’s darker cover

A Lonely Magic’s lighter cover

Looking at them side-by-side definitely makes me think that I should keep trying to tweak that background wavy-box. I don’t really have any good design tools, which makes it hard to do anything clever and creative, but I could keep trying. I’m not sure it’s a worthwhile use of my time, though! Anyway, opinions welcome, please.

Also, the current blurb:

WTF? What did she ever do to him?

When a gorgeous guy gives her an unthinkable choice – a bullet to the brain or enough pills to sleep forever – he plunges 21-year-old Fen into a sea of trouble. Although she’s rescued in the nick of time by a teenage boy, Luke, and his sexy older brother, Kaio, escaping from her would-be killer won’t be so easy. Her brush with death is only the beginning of her wild journey.

The brothers aren’t ordinary men, and Fen’s rescue and her supposedly safe retreat have unnerving layers. How did they find her? What do they want with her? Who can she trust? And why was she targeted for murder in the first place?

As Fen and Luke are forced to run for their lives, Luke spirits Fen away, into an enchanting underwater city. But every enchantment has its dark edges. Fen must face an otherworldly plot that threatens not only her life but those of millions of human beings…and she must look deep within herself to find the strength and courage she’ll need to get out of this strange new world alive.

Submerge yourself in the latest gripping novel from Sarah Wynde, author of the Tassamara series. You won’t want to come up for air before the final enthralling page of A Lonely Magic.

*****

I think I want a new headline, so I’m still working on that, but otherwise, for those of you who haven’t read it, does it sound interesting? And for those of you who have, does it sound right? Any suggestions for changes?

Thanks for your help!

Shaming Your Heroine

NSFW: Bad language ahead.

I want to rant about a book. I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the book that I want to read, that I’m probably never going to write, but that I wish someone would write.

In that book, someone tries to shame a girl. Let’s say her ex-boyfriend posts pictures of her giving him a blowjob on the internet. Revenge porn, that’s what it’s called.

But this girl, unlike Jessica Logan and Audrie Pott and Hope Witsell (Note: just the top three found after searching “teenage girl suicide naked photos” on google, without even leaving the first page)… this girl says, “Oh, hell, no.”

This girl goes straight to the ex-boyfriend and says, “Dude, you get those photos down or you are never having sex in this town again.” Turns out it’s too late–it’s always too late–so she does what she says she’s going to do.

She gets her sisters–not literal sisters, but women who are sympathetic, which is what, all of us, except the very few evil ones?–to plaster the campus in posters. Maybe even her pictures, with the most x-rated bits blacked out, his parts circled and the heading, “John Smith. The kind of guy who takes photos and puts them on the internet without permission.” Or “John Smith. He’s the kind of p***ck who posts photos of his girlfriends on the internet. It’s ’cause he doesn’t know how to use his.”

She buys the domain names for his name, all of them, and posts his image, with a detailed listing of what he did, including the number of times she’s had to hear about her photo from friends and acquaintances and how she feels it may affect her future. She ends the post, on all the domain names, with “Warning: Sleeping with this man may lead to future humiliation and pain. (And won’t get you off. He’s a lousy fuck.)” She looks into SEO optimization and learns how to make her pages the top hits on every google search for his name. Every future employer, every future girlfriend, will find her pages first.

And then she gets nasty. Every time she sees him, she makes the circled finger blowjob motion with one hand and a hard slashing knife motion with the other. She gets her girlfriends to do the same. They get their girlfriends to do the same. Pretty soon, every woman on campus, at the sight of John Smith, the crappy smug ex-boyfriend who thought it would be funny to post her picture online, threatens to castrate him. But not with words, just with a gesture. He complains, of course. People get called into the president’s office. But the women go with wide-eyed innocence and start making their moves more subtly.

He gets nasty, too, of course. That would be inevitable. But she’s been waiting for it and the moment he threatens her, she slaps a restraining order on him. Clever girl, she was carrying a recording device in her pocket and caught the threat on audio recording. (Digital, I’m sure–probably just her iphone, ready to go at the click of a button.) She never goes anywhere alone and she lets him know that if he violates the restraining order, she’ll be perfectly happy to kneecap him with the gun she carries with her.

Meanwhile, when her English teacher gives her the look–you know the one–she looks back at him steadily. Should he even hint at something, she says, acid in her voice, “Been looking at porn, Mr. Jones? I wonder how the administration would feel about that. I hope you haven’t been doing it on your work computer.” He’ll think twice before he tries again.

Books that slut-shame girls by making them think they should be humiliated by photos of themselves engaged in sexual behavior are supporting the culture that tells girls to kill themselves over those photos. I want someone to write the book that tells them to get angry instead. Tells them to be furious at the betrayal of their right to privacy, of their ability to trust. Tells them that there is nothing, nothing, NOTHING wrong with the sight of their naked bodies and that what is very, very, VERY wrong is the behavior of a guy who would share a private moment with the world without permission.

I want someone to write this book. It would be so much more useful to the New Age readers than the books that encourage them to think that their lives are over if people they know see pictures of them engaged in sexual activity.

Rant over.

Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is hard when you’ve lost your mom and your sole chick is the entire distance of the country away. I should have bought myself flowers. But I made a lovely dinner. This steelhead trout is the first recipe I think I have ever invented completely from scratch and it was just as good the second time as it was the first. Food that comes with a “you thought this up” badge makes me happy. And I ate strawberries that were delicious, so yay!

I spent this morning cleaning out my RSS feed. Obviously, I did this because I have about 20 more useful things to do, including fold the laundry, call the insurance agent, clean out the paper files, organize some tax paperwork, start writing my next book, and so on… but I was glad I did it when I was done. My RSS reader had gotten so full of sites that I’d stopped reading most of it. The slimmed-down version is going to be a lot more usable.

But it made me think about blogging and how it’s changed. So many sites are dead now. And so many sites have turned into simple announcement pages. People who used to tell stories about their lives in their blogs now just announce their books or post book covers. I suppose I understand it, but I still feel like my blog is more of a scrapbook for me–a very long-running easy-to-use journal, maybe. It might be an unprofessional decision, but I suspect I’ll keep posting my random thoughts here. Maybe I’ll make the link in the books link to the business site instead, and that can be the place that I post non-conversational announcements and such. Maybe.

Ran my first paid ad over the weekend. Thirty dollars and… well, I may or may not earn it back. It definitely didn’t cause any great swing in sales. I’m running another–the big one, Bookbub–next Monday. It cost $130, so it’ll be interesting to see if that one’s worth it. Thirty dollars requires some thought, but break into the hundreds and I spend endless mental hours debating.

Hmm, I feel like I’m rambling. I think I’ll go eat some lunch and then get some exercise. Maybe it’ll motivate me to start writing this afternoon. Or at least call the insurance company!

If I were a filmmaker…

Not really a serious filmmaker, just someone good with a camera, I would make a movie of my two dogs and their styles of playing Fetch. Possibly I should call it playing with balls, rather than Fetch, because the fetching part… not so effective.

Zelda (a fifteen-pound Jack Russell terrier) doesn’t like small balls. She likes basketballs. I think I posted a movie once of her playing with the basketball in the water, but the balls are twice the size of her head. I throw the ball in the water, she jumps in after it, herds it to shore with her nose, corners it and chews it until she succeeds in popping it, and then, triumphantly, brings me the remains. Then we play with the remains for a while.

Bartleby doesn’t know how to play. Not at all. We’ve been working on it, trying to encourage him, being enthusiastic–I actually made him a toy from a couple socks because he won’t go near real dog toys and every once in a while, I can get him to chew on that for a while. But today he was out by the pool with us and I could see that he wanted to play. He kept sort of trying, until finally I got up and found a tennis ball. Tried to get him to take it from me. He wouldn’t. But when I placed it on the ground between his feet, he actually put his mouth on it, then carried it about ten feet away and dropped it. I was so pleased and so proud of him. Yay, Bartleby, you go, you moved a toy! So I went and got it and we did it again. And then again. And then I realized that Bartleby’s version of Fetch requires that the person do the fetching. He does the removing, I do the retrieving. But hey, it’s a game, and he’s playing.

So the movie would be two minutes long, one a super-condensed version of Zelda taking three hours to retrieve the basketball (because she has to destroy it first) and one of Bartleby taking the tennis ball and moving it ten feet away. My dogs. So sweet they are.

In other news, I haven’t written anything for a week. I’m doing a presentation at an Orlando library this weekend and it’s occupying more of my brain than it should. It was meant to be a repeat of a presentation I’ve given before, but I feel like I have new things to say about context and layering and point-of-view. So I haven’t written that yet, but I will and then I have to decide what to write next.

I think one of the reasons that I haven’t moved on is that I really haven’t. I gave ALM to the editor but I have a pretty lengthy list of edits I want to make to it, ranging from stuff like “do I mention cookies too often?” to “make scene x more plausible by adding y details.” Some of them are fairly big edits. I have one idea–courtesy of Barbara (thanks, I think?)–that would mean at least another major chapter/scene to write and more dramatic ending revisions, so I’m contemplating that. Not with a ton of enthusiasm, but if it makes the book better, it’s worth it. But I can’t do anything until I get it back from the editor in June. Writing it was definitely a lot more fun than editing it has turned out to be!